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Hey Just used your method B to upgrade from 160GB to 500GB on XP. Worked flawlessly. I think that the amount of freedom to do what you want in a computer is directly proportional to your operating knowledge, the lower end being a system with a one button mouse . . , middle being Windows-land and the high plateau being Linux and its various distro's. I am impressed with the functionality of Linux, I used Slax and Gparted.

Going Again

Thanks for the welcome saikee
Im now passing on my 160GB sata drive to my father who had a 120GB ide drive using the dd function its taking a lot longer . . im in the third hour i think, last time it took 1.5 hours, is this because it has to go from the IDE bus thingy to the Sata bus?. I used the same parameters as before. Ill let you know how it goes.

In older kernels dd always displays the prompt on completion. This is to say dd accepts the command, executes it and shows nothing if the operation is successful.

One can get some sense of the progress by issuing a "date" statement before and after the dd command. The first "date" command shows the time before dd is executed but the second "date" command will not produce any display until after the completion of the dd command. Thus if the second "date" output is displayed the difference between the two shows the time it has taken to carry out the cloning.

On newer kernel dd actually reports the time it took to complete the task.

The time it takes is also easily estimated. Internal to internal disks cloning will get a throughput of between 40 to 60Mb/s, depending on the type of hard disk and CPU. If one of the disk is attached to a USB port then the speed will cut back to about 10 to 12 Mb/s.

Um, actually, that's not a function of the kernel version. It must be a function of the version of dd, since the only thing that dd does is call read() and write() in a loop (in the absence of errors, anyway). If dd prints out anything when it finishes, that's something that it does on its own.

Also, while something like dd if=blah of=blah ; date will tell you what time the program completed, time dd if=blah of=blah will give you lots of info about how long dd took. (That's information like how much total wall time it took, how many CPU-seconds were spent in userspace, and how many CPU-seconds were spent in kernel space. The sum of the second and third are not necessarily equal to the first, because of multi-processor machines.)

Hey,
I just joined to say thanks, this worked perfectly on my lifebook without any drives whatsoever - that's no CD, no floppy, and won't boot from USB.
I just wanted to make a suggestion to those who are doing this in order to install an OS on a laptop such as the one I have:
On another laptop with a CDROM and a working copy of XP, I went to install a fresh copy of XP and made sure it copied the source files to the installation disk - basically to the point where you boot and it will continue the installation.
Then I took an external usb adapter, hooked up a "blank" hard drive, and formatted and partitioned the drive.
I booted ubuntu, and followed your instructions - making *SURE* to make the partition identical, and after several hours (usb 1.1 is slowwww - 12000 seconds) I just dropped the hard drive into the lifebook and proceeded to finish installing XP. No problems, no worries, no extra steps.
Note > Several hours for 12gb. USB 1.1 is severely overrated.

USB 1.1 is rated at 12 Mbit/s whereas the standard USB 2.0 runs at 480Mbit/s. The ratio is is a 40-fold increase.

I would take the laptop disks and mounted them as internal disks (with 2.5" to 3.5" disk adaptors) in a desktop PC to speed things up. Internal disks can run at 3 to 5 times faster than the fastest USB.

Clone XP with Live CD

I used this method to clone my XP SP2 HDD, and it worked perfectly. I moved from a 250 gb to 500gb Hitachi SATA deskstar. It worked very well, and took about 2 hours and 20 minutes to complete.
I used an Ubuntu 8.10 (beta) CD. Instructions were clear and results have been great.
For the unallocated section left over, I just formatted it as another "drive" with the XP drive management stuff.
Thanks very much for the instructions.. saved me the purchase of Ghost or another backup software.
I had tried HDClone but couldn't get it to work ( no mouse control when booted into HDClone, and the fixes that I found didn't overcome the problem)
Thanks again.
David Evans
London, Canada